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Week 33  Joel & Jonah

A couple of days after reading Joel I read Jonah.
I like the story. Despite doing exactly the opposite of what the Lord told him to do Jonah finally got to Nineveh and preached to them. The king issued a decree: let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger.
This sounded very familiar to me and I flipped back a few pages. Joel had said: return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing.
Who knows is an interesting question. It’s about action that’s taken…but that action has an uncertain outcome.
The action was to call urgently on God (Jonah) and to return to the Lord your God (Joel). The action was based on a couple of known qualities about the Lord: he may relent and with compassion turn (Jonah) and he may turn and have pity (Joel).
Action: turn to the Lord.
Outcome: the Lord might relent. Maybe. Who knows for sure?
On balance I figure the Lord will probably relent nine times out of ten since it takes real effort for someone to get to the Point of No Return. But in Joel & Jonah some uncertainty remained.

Note: quotes from Jonah 3:8-9 Joel 2:13-14 (NIV)

Week 33  Obadiah

A verse in Obadiah is already underlined in my bible: the day of the Lord is near for all nations. As you have done, it will be done to you; your deeds will return upon your own head. I underline the second phrase again: as you have done, it will be done to you.
It seems to me like an important thing to keep in mind. I’ve seen it before:
Joshua asks Achan: why have you brought this disaster on us? The Lord will bring disaster on you today
Adoni-bezek: now God has paid me back for what I did
David to Shimei: now the Lord will repay you for your wrongdoing
Nehemiah prays: remember me with favor, O my God, for all I have done for this people
Haman’s scheme: came back on his own head
David about an evil person: the trouble he causes recoils on himself.
There’s quite a few like that.
As you have done, it will be done to you sounds to me like a rock-solid principle that operates everywhere and always. Which means it applies to me too: as I have done, it will be done to me.
I move through my life accumulating all my behaviours. Most of them might disappear from my memory but none of them get disconnected from their own repercussions.

Note: quotes from Obadiah 15 Joshua 7:25 Judges 1:7 I Kings 2:44 Nehemiah 5:19 Esther 9:25 Psalm 7:16 Proverbs (NIV)

 

Week 33  Joel 2

I’ve been reading the prophets for a month-and-a-half now so I’ve gradually shifted into a mental zone where I’m expecting quite a bit of gloom-and-doom.
Reading Joel today I wondered what “quite a bit” converted to in numerical terms so I decided to count verses.
There’s 73-verses in the book and I decided I’d do a simple two-part contrast: Dark Forecasts vs. Non-Dark Forecasts. I recorded them by putting a penciled dot beside Dark Forecast verses.
The number I had in my head before reading – it was a pure guess – was that Joel would have maybe 80% Dark Forecasts.
In the first 31-verses I dotted 27 verses: ~87%!
But then partway through chapter 2 Joel said (quoting the Lord): even now…return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. And then Joel added: return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing.
From that point on I wasn’t adding many dots. Almost the whole rest of the book was Non-Dark (my final Dark tally dropped to 42%).
Anyway…all that aside I thought about Joel’s pretty good question: who knows?
One of the tricky things with prophetic forecasts is that even though they sound very definite there sometimes seems to be an open-endedness to them too. Dependably predictable. But not absolutely predictable.

Note: quotes from Joel 2:12 13-14 (NIV)

Week 33  Daniel 9 & 10

Prayer #1:
In chapter 9 Daniel prays a serious prayer: I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting. I wore rough sackcloth and sprinkled myself with ashes.
The chapter records that sixteen-verse prayer…and then this happens: as I was praying, Gabriel…came swiftly to me…He explained to me, “Daniel, I have come here to give you insight and understanding. The moment you began praying, a command was given. I am here to tell you what it was”.
Prayer #2:
Daniel had a slightly different experience in the next chapter. Just like before it was a serious prayer: I, Daniel, had been mourning for three weeks. All that time I had eaten no rich food or meat, had drunk no wine, and had used no fragrant oils.
Eventually a man (who was in reality more-than-a-man) appeared: don’t be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day you began to pray for understanding and to humble yourself…your request has been heard in heaven. I have come in answer to your prayer.
Prayer #1 Response Time: swiftly.
Prayer #2 Response Time: twenty-one days.
In both cases Daniel prayed and the prayer was registered/received – from the look of it – right away. But the response times were different.
Even though Daniel’s prayers arrived instantly he found out that he had to expect and manage shorter and longer feedback wait times.

Note: quotes from Daniel 9:3 21-22 & 10:2-3 12 (NLT)

Week 32  Daniel 2

Daniel’s prayer told me several things about the Lord:
He alone has wisdom and power
He determines the course of world events
He removes kings and sets others on the throne
He gives wisdom to the wise…
He reveals deep and mysterious things
(He) knows what lies hidden in darkness
Though he himself is surrounded by light.
While I’m reading through I usually look for things that the bible says about the Lord – and Daniel’s prayer told me seven or eight.
But one caught my attention: the Lord determines the course of world events.
That’s what it says. And I sat wondering what it meant.
If the Lord determined every single action to the point where no individual in reality actually decided anything independently then that would be Total Determination. It’s possible that if every single action was totally determined then I maybe wouldn’t know about it but either way if Total Determination’s the rule it’s a pretty theoretical one.
I’m more interested in practical day-to-day reality where I decide to do something and then it happens. In which case when the Lord determines the course of world events it makes sense that he’s managing it in an open-ended Non-Total kind of way. People in China Brazil Turkey Canada Russia make decisions that push world events in one direction…and different decisions would push them in another direction. But while all that’s happening the Lord makes overall determinations. He’s a Determination Coordinator.

Note: quote from Daniel 2:20-23 (NLT)

Week 32  Ezekiel 40

The last big section of Ezekiel is about Ezekiel’s vision of a Temple. A bible reader might think it’s tedious reading but – for me – it’s tedious in an interesting way. There are quite a few exact measurements of the structure and detailed descriptions of the floor plan & decorative elements & furnishings. If I’m trying to mentally reconstruct the temple it’s easy to get lost. But I’m not really aiming at an architectural replica.
Last year I wrote that “Ezekiel’s Vision-Temple was never built (that I know about) and whether it’s a future building-project waiting-to-happen is debatable.” And I was thinking about that same thing this year.
There’s at least two ways to think about Ezekiel’s Temple. The first is that it was a building that Ezekiel was shown in a visionary experience and he was toured around the facility and given specific measurements. And the plan was that that building would eventually be built. That’s one way to see it.
The other way is to see it as a vision of something fantastic to come. But not a real live temple like the one Ezekiel saw in his vision.
Two ways: a temple-in-a-dream that was a forecast of a temple that would eventually become a temple in real life. Or else a temple-in-a-dream that would never become a real temple because it was meant to represent something temple-like but not an actual temple.

Note: see “Ezekiel’s Temple” July 13, 2021.

Week 31  Ezekiel 16

I count six times where Sodom is mentioned in the chapter. The cross-reference in the margin points me back to Genesis 13 but I’m familiar with the story – a couple of “guys” from The Other Side have crossed over into this world and gone to the city of Sodom where a testosterone-jacked local mob try to gang-rape them (unsuccessfully).
The Genesis story of Sodom leaves me with the feeling that Sodom’s problem was that they were sexual adventurers who – I guess – did whatever they sexually wanted. So what Ezekiel says adds detail to the Sodom Story.
He says that a couple of other reasons the residents of Sodom were punished was because they were:
Arrogant, overfed and unconcerned
They did not help the poor and needy
They acted haughty and
Did detestable things before (the Lord).
I wonder about the list…wonder if it’s comprehensive. But my guess is that it’s more likely a representative list (for instance ‘haughty actions’ and ‘detestable things’ sound like general headings that would include specific ‘actions’ & definite ‘things’).
Ezekiel’s details are a help since Genesis is pretty generic: the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord.
But I had to read more than a thousand pages between Genesis 13 and Ezekiel 16 before I get those details. So this is another good reminder to read all-of-it before coming to conclusions.

Note: quotes from Ezekiel 16: 49-50 & Genesis 13:13 (NIV)

Week 31  Jeremiah 28

Q: What events had happened just before Jeremiah 28?
A: The Babylonians had conquered Israel. They’d shipped off king Jehoiachin to Babylon and stolen a load of religious utensils and set up a Babylon-sponsored lackey-king to caretake things in Jerusalem.
So…in 28 a prophet – Hananiah – made a prophetic forecast. He said that within two years Babylon would release Jehoiachin and ship him and the temple implements back to Jerusalem and things would pick up where they’d left off.
Jeremiah admitted that it was a pretty nice prophecy but that – unfortunately – things wouldn’t turn out that way. He explained the Test of a Prophet to Hananiah: the prophet who prophesies peace will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord only if his prediction comes true.
A prophecy is true if it comes true.
Which means prophecy creates a bit of a dilemma for the audience. When people have two opposing predictions they can’t know which is true until one comes true. How is a prophetic prediction legitimized? If Pre-diction = Post-diction then I’ve got a Genuine Forecast.
By the time future-time morphs into present-time and the forecast becomes either true or false it might be too late to be of actionable use to the audience. So maybe prophecy has as much value for a person looking back as for a person who was looking into the uncertain future.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 28:9 (NIV). End of July reading report: 66% of the bible read in 58% of the year.

Week 29  Jeremiah 25

Most chapters in the bible aren’t dated but yesterday I found one that was. In the first verse of this chapter Jeremiah said that a prophecy had come to him during the 4th-year of Jehoiakim’s reign…which happened to be the 1st-year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign in Babylon (that was 605 BC).
In that same chapter Jeremiah went on to predict that Nebuchadnezzar would eventually attack and conquer Jerusalem. Since I found out yesterday that Jerusalem was captured by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC – roughly eight years later – Jeremiah’s forecast had to wait awhile before people realized it was true. Of maybe long enough that by then they’d forgotten it.
Anyway not only did Jeremiah predict that Nebuchadnezzar would attack Jerusalem and Israel’s geopolitical neighbours but also that: this whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years. But when the seventy years are fulfilled I will punish…the land of the Babylonians for their guilt.
I was already searching up Nebuchadnezzar so it was easy to find when Babylon was conquered – 539 BC. 605 BC to 539 BC is closer to 66 years than 70 so I’m not sure what to do with the discrepancy. Maybe 2500 years ago the practice was to round-up to the nearest decade.
Anyway apart from the technical debate over the 70 years in Jeremiah’s forecast his prediction about the fall of Babylon is still pretty impressive.

Note: see Jeremiah 25:1. Quote from 25:11-12 (NIV)

Week 29  Jeremiah 1

The introduction to Jeremiah says: the word of the Lord came to (Jeremiah) in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah, and through the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah.
When I read that a couple of days ago I did some homework looking for extra details about when Jeremiah’s kings were kings. This is what I found:
Josiah (639-609 BC)
Jehoahaz (609 BC)
Jehoiakim (608-597 BC)
Jehoiachin (597 BC)
Zedekiah (597-586 BC).
Jeremiah started to prophecy during Josiah’s 13th year (~626 BC) and he continued until Zedekiah’s 11th – and last – year (~586 BC). The time span from 626-586 BC is roughly 40 years. That’s what I discovered last Monday – Jeremiah was a prophet for 40 years.
Anyway today I started reading chapter 25 and it said that those events occurred: in the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah. So right away I looked back at Monday’s homework notes and calculated that from Josiah’s 13th year (~626BC) to Jehoiakim’s 4th year (~604BC) is roughly 22 years. But  it turned out I didn’t need to run those numbers because Jeremiah says two verses later: for twenty-three years – from the thirteenth year of Josiah…until this very day – the word of the Lord has come to me. So by the time I arrive at Jeremiah 25 Jeremiah is 23 years into his long stretch of prophesying.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 1:2-3 & 25:1 3 (NIV)